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Ellen Nolte Joins RAND Europe as Director of Health and Healthcare Team

FOR RELEASE

ThursdayMay 14, 2009

Ellen Nolte, formerly senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has joined RAND Europe as the new director of the health and healthcare team, announced Jonathan Grant, president of the organisation.

RAND Europe is a policy research organisation based in Cambridge UK whose research agenda includes the study of a broad range of health policy issues.

Nolte's appointment builds on the strength of RAND Europe's existing health and healthcare team. Professor Martin Roland CBE, a leading figure in the field of health services research, acts as special advisor to the team. He recently took up the post of professor of health services research at the University of Cambridge. The blend of knowledge between Nolte and Roland, together with the members of the existing team, will greatly enhance RAND Europe's ability to produce high impact health research addressing a range of issues, Grant said.

"Ellen's expertise in health systems and policy will complement and contribute to the development and growth of our existing team. No doubt that we will benefit from her skills and knowledge. We are delighted that she will be joining us," Grant said.

Nolte also is an honorary senior research fellow at the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. Her training and doctorate are in public health, and she has a special interest in comparative health policy and health systems research, including health system performance assessment and international health care comparisons on a range of health policy issues. Her particular interest is in the development of innovative approaches linking health systems and population health outcomes.

"I welcome the challenge of developing RAND Europe's health and healthcare research. It is an exciting opportunity and allows me to build on my previous work in ways that will have an increasing impact on policy in the UK and the rest of Europe," Nolte said.

"The new links with the University of Cambridge mean that it is a particularly exciting time for us to develop Cambridge as one of the leading centres of applied health research in Europe," she added.

Before joining the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 1998 as Marie Curie Research Fellow, Nolte was a research fellow at Bielefeld University and the Federal Agency for Occupational Safety and Health in Berlin.

About RAND Europe's health research

RAND Europe is an independent, not-for-profit research institution with offices in Cambridge UK and Brussels BE.

Its mission is to help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis. RAND Europe is part of the larger RAND Corporation, an independent, nonprofit institution that provides research and analysis on a broad spectrum of policy topics including education, national security, civil justice, the environment, and health and health care policy.

RAND Europe is developing a health services research programme that focuses on a set of key themes in health care policy. These include the improvement of health care quality and efficiency, and the evaluation of health care policy and new medical technologies. Examples of research currently undertaken by RAND Europe include: modelling the response of patients to increased hospital choice, impact assessments of policy options for the European Commission with respect to secondary smoking, organ donation, patient safety and food labelling, and the importance of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to contain costs and improve quality of health care.

The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest.